Jeanne Clinton, special advisor for efficiency, California Public Utilities Commission, covered building energy-management measures from an economic-development point of view. She said committing to green building produces multiple wins: operating-cost savings, stimulation of the economy with investments in products and services, creation of jobs and upgrading of jobs to higher skill levels, and carbon-emissions reduction.

“There’s an unlimited amount of capital available in the private sector, if we can deliver the right proposal (to building decision-makers),” Clinton said.

There are challenges to selling owners on the benefits of high-performance buildings, Clinton acknowledged.

“We need business models and financing models that give us the ability to make a compelling case,” Clinton said. “We also need to have enough personnel with the right talents to deliver the goods.”

Clinton advised design engineers to pursue three courses of action to strengthen the high-performance-buildings market:

• Standardize or otherwise make the retrofit process easier for investors, owners, and facility managers to understand.

“We’re going to have to take it up a notch if we want to deliver on the opportunities,” Clinton said.

The event’s second-day keynote speaker, Eric Corey Freed, LEED AP, founding principal of organicARCHITECT, San Francisco, said the Klaxon alarm on climate change is ringing loud and clear, and those who deny or ignore it do so at their—and the human race’s—peril.

Coining a new term for humanity, “Dodo sapiens,” Freed said, “We won’t be the first species to wipe itself out, but we will be the first to do it knowingly.”

According to Freed, the job and goal of the engineering and architectural communities should be to make every building a high-performance building.

“What we do now is take traditional buildings and add things to them to make them green, when we should be conceiving them as green from the start,” Freed said. “What we really need are living, regenerative buildings that take control and responsibility for their own water, waste, energy, and food.”

Liu, who chaired the project committee that developed the guide, said the publication represents the next step toward net-zero-energy buildings, but cautioned it cannot be used in a vacuum.

“Successfully creating a high-performing building takes integrated design,” Liu said. “It’s not just for designers or ASHRAE members; it must apply to all the individuals who touch the building.”

McConahey, who served on the project committee that developed the guide, agreed.

“We must move beyond a hierarchical model characterized by antagonism and silo-making in the design process,” McConahey said. “Just because you had everybody in the same room talking to each other didn’t mean you were going to have an energy-efficient building come out of it. You have to focus on the right things at the right times in the process, and everybody has to contribute savings.”